Livorno (Leghorn), a port city in the Italian region of Tuscany, was home to one of the largest Sephardicommunities in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and a major crossroads linking Jewish communities in Europe with those in North Africa and the Ottoman Levant. In 1591 and 1593, Ferdinand I, the Medici grand duke of Tuscany, issued two charters (known as the livornine) granting ample privileges and religious freedom to attract foreign merchants and thus to develop the port of Livorno. Promising immunity from the Catholic Inquisition, among other things, this wa…